R devel - Jun 2010 - How to debug: Cons memory exhausted

Hello,
I get an error when binary structures from a pipe

'Error: cons memory exhausted (limit reached?)' (but R does not crash)

This is probably due to some bug in my code, but occurs after reading
about 85K pairs of RAWSXP objects (each < 20 bytes).

I do not have any explicit calls to malloc/calloc

I'm going through my code and have inserted the (brute force) printf
statements
my question is: Does anybody have an advice on debugging this particular
error?

Any help will be appreciated
Regards
Saptarshi

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On Jun 20, 2010, at 11:15 AM, Saptarshi Guha wrote:
> Hello,
> I get an error when binary structures from a pipe
> 
> 'Error: cons memory exhausted (limit reached?)' (but R does not
crash)
> 
> This is probably due to some bug in my code, but occurs after reading
> about 85K pairs of RAWSXP objects (each < 20 bytes).
> 
> I do not have any explicit calls to malloc/calloc
> 
It has nothing to do with malloc/calloc - it means that the number of nodes (=R
objects) has reached the limit. Normally the limit is soft so it will adjust up
to SIZE_MAX (for all practical purposes unlimited on 64-bit machines). However,
in low-memory conditions it may not be possible to allocate more heap space so
that is more likely your limit.

> I'm going through my code and have inserted the (brute force) printf
> statements
> my question is: Does anybody have an advice on debugging this particular
> error?
> 
You can set a breakpoint on mem_err_cons. In general it means that you are
simply running out of memory.

Cheers,
Simon